Have you ever wondered what the best yet affordable Outdoor Advertising Medium is?
Finding the best medium for your brand campaign shouldn’t be left to trial and error. The industry has methods and practices to measure the success of each medium. These logistics are integral to deciding media, and being informed can help you optimize for the best result.
There are departments in most ad agencies that deal with the buying and selling of media. A Media Planner handles these departments. A media planner studies your budget and target market to determine the most efficient spending method. Some agencies specialize in media planning and offer exclusive services. Other agencies specialize in a particular media and assist in that domain. Brands can use third-party agencies or get a deal directly with the owner for buying media. Using a specialized third party to this end is advisableas they understand the sector more and can offer you the service that benefits you the most. For example, we at Movia Media specialize in Mobile Outdoors and work through agencies or directly with clients to meet your needs.
Picture Source: CampaignAsia
Efficiency vs Effectiveness
Picture Source – Academicgain tutorials
To determine the best medium, advertisers use two E’s; Efficiency and Effectiveness. Multiple factors go into determining the best choice, and these two factors simplify the decision-making process. If you are a brand or advertiser looking for the best media to advertise, these are the two E’s you should pay attention to before choosing your media.
Efficiency is used for cost. You might aspire to feature the biggest celebrity in your Ad or have a stellar idea that involves enormous production. Still, none of these are plausible if your budget isn’t big enough. You should devise budget-friendly strategies or cost-efficient methods to advertise to fit the campaign to its budget. Cost-efficient practices ensure money isn’t over-spent, and the brand is getting the value of its spending. Efficiency is determined through calculation, not by trial and error.
Effectiveness is used in correlation with campaigns. An effective campaign would reach the maximum number of people multiple times or garner the highest impression. Also, just because a medium is capable of a more significant number of audiences doesn’t mean that it is effective. These people should be your target market or potential market.
Media planning is a complex process. It is easier to understand the structure if you are familiar with specific terms. The basic rule to remember is that the most cost-efficient medium would reach the most people with the least amount of money.
Terms and Formulas
–Rating
It is used to determine the effectiveness of Television and Radio programs. There are agencies like Nielsen that rates TV programs.
–Cost Per Point
CPP is used in TV and Radio.
CPP = Cost / Rating
-Impressions
Impressions are the number of people who saw your Ad. It also considers the number of times a single individual has seen your Ad.
A campaign should garner a benchmark digit of 125 minimum in a week. Anything lower than that is considered inefficient.
-Cost Per Thousand or CPM
The number of impressions then gets plugged into a simple formula that converts it into a cost-per-mile CPM measurement, which indicates the cost of the billboard advertisement relative to every 1,000 views.
CPM = Cost/ Impressions * 1000
Why Outdoor?
Picture Source – emcoutdoors
Any good campaign should garner a weekly benchmark impression of 125. In the case of Out of Home Advertising, even a small-scale campaign can achieve 175 benchmarks. Out of Home advertising costs 80% less than television. Unlike the common perception of TV and Socials being effective, in outdoor advertisements, people don’t have the option to skip past an Ad or block it. Anyone who comes across an outdoor Ad notices it consciously or unconsciously. It sums up that OOH is an effective medium. Not only is OOH effective, but it is efficient as well.
Out-of-Home Advertising rates vary from city to city. The price of a Bulletin isn’t the same as it is in Toronto as it is in Montreal. Also, rates are susceptible to market fluctuations. For example, it costs more to advertise outdoors during Summer due to the increase in demand. Also, the cost of a digital board is different from that of a static. Out-of-Home industry uses different types of pricing models. Typically, billboard advertisers pay for the Ad space using one of the pricing structures below:
- Fixed pricing model: As the name suggests fixed pricing model uses a one-off fee for a specific amount of time. You pay the owner a fixed amount to put up your billboard permanently for the duration of time. This model is quick and hassle-free.
- Loop pricing model: This model is generally used for a digital billboard that can play different ads on a loop. The media buyers pay for a guaranteed number of playouts. The buyer can pay for the number of playouts per loop or play out every specified number of loops.
- Cost per playout model: The pricing is for the total number of playouts regardless of the loop.
- CPM pricing model: This model uses CPM calculations to determine the value of your Ad space. It means that the cost is determined by every 1000 impressions garnered by the billboard. Often the publisher or owner sets a threshold price in this model to avoid incurring losses. Also, programmatic DOOHs make this model efficient for both parties.
A point to note – fixed pricing is used mainly for print billboards, while digital signage tends to use loop pricing, cost per playout, or CPM.
If you choose a place-based inventory, remember that it has a higher CPM. As the goal of every brand campaign is ad retention and recall by an audience, necessarily, the CPM is higher as they are reaching a wider audience. However, you can also place it during specific times and seasons when the audience is most receptive and at a point in their day where they have more time to pay attention to get the best results for your spending.
Don’t leave the process once you have bought your space and launched your Ad. These are significant investments; it’s essential to track their performance afterwards. A billboard conversion rate is a way of doing so. This is a more complicated process; it is imperative to ensure the agency or owner has the technology to do so. We at Movia Media have patented cutting-edge technology to get measurable results.
Also, you can measure traffic using these two distinct ways listed below.
Direct – These are converted consumers who directly enact the call to action, such as visiting the website or using the promotional code listed on the billboard.
Organic – The average consumer often has less than eight seconds to look at your ad, which may not be enough time to remember more than the name of your business. If they find your website by searching it, that’s considered organic traffic.
Differentiating between direct and organic traffic can enable you to use your billboard conversion rate to study the impact of your messaging and billboard design. For example, an overload of organic traffic could signal that your ad lacks the brevity and concision that billboards require.
From there, conversion rate software tools are your best bet for analyzing website data. The right program will be able to show you two critical markers of billboard ad performance:
- The conversion rate: the number of viewers who act on your ad
- The conversion volume: the total number of conversions within a given period.
Additionally, conversion volume can also reflect the financial value associated with mutations.
So at the end of the day, how much does it cost for outdoor advertising in Toronto? On average, local advertising in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, costs $600-$3,500.
Why Mobile Advertising?
Mobile Advertising can generate more impressions than any other outdoor medium. One vehicle wrap can generate between 30,000 – 80,000 impressions daily. This means that Mobile Advertising has a lower CPM than any other outdoor Advertising. This travelling billboard has higher recall rates as well. Mobile Advertising CPM is lower than $2 and has more added flexibility than other Outdoor Channels.
Mobile Advertisements, unlike static billboards, are not susceptible to real-estate fluctuations and land restrictions. Brands don’t have to worry about the ROI and conversion rates because there are technologies for these measurements. Truck Advertisements are especially effective when trying to reach a specific target market.Thus Mobile Advertisements are one of the most cost-efficient mediums out there.
Cost efficiency doesn’t correlate to smaller campaigns, like Mobile Advertising, if the medium is effective. Big brands like Coca-Cola and Amazon spend a lot on Mobile Advertisements. We at Movia have partnered with big brands like Walmart and Shoppers Drug Mart. Choosing a cost-efficient medium, in this case, would leave you with more budget for other channels.
There are many things to consider when planning your media during campaign development. People generally have a false assumption that the success of a campaign solely relies on creativity. If your choose to place your Ads in the wrong medium, it would mean that your target audience wouldn’t get to see your Ads despite the creative efforts. You can always choose other channels, but adding Mobile Advertisements to your media mix is always a safe strategy. Why? Because Mobile Advertisement, unlike other media, can take your messages wherever your target audience are.
